​University presidents from the Nordic Five Tech partners meeting in Copenhagen in June 2017.

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Nordic university presidents want to collaborate on PhD programme

The partner universities within Nordic Five tech – an alliance between the five leading Nordic technical universities – will help PhD students who want to do their programmes in more than one of the Nordic countries.

"Together, the five technical universities in the Nordic Five Tech alliance have a great breadth and expertise in both research and education. Of course we should jointly take advantage of all this and the many new impulses that exchanges between our University provides, says Chalmers President Stefan Bengtsson.”

More PhD students are to do their programmes across the five partner universities in the Nordic Five Tech alliance. That was the wish expressed by the presidents of the leading technical partner universities in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden when they met on 1 June at DTU.

Here, they agreed on recommending a common guideline which all heads of PhD schools and supervisors are encouraged to follow. PhD students can, among other things, spend 6-12 months at another of the alliance’s universities and get a supervisor at both universities. The alliance has also established a common course database that everyone can use.

“The PhD collaboration supports the alliance’s vision of building up an ‘extended campus’ where employees and students can benefit from the individual universities’ specialized competences, advanced infrastructures, and unique study programmes,” says Anders Overgaard Bjarklev, DTU President.

Nordic Five Tech is already collaborating on offering five joint MSC programmes, on quality assuring the Nordic study programmes, and on research within selected Nordic fields of excellence, including the Arctic. In the coming year, the collaboration will be expanded to cover new fields. General supplementary education courses will be developed, among other things, and the collaboration on innovation and entrepreneurship will be given high priority.

According to Times Higher Education, the five partner universities are among the world’s 55 leading ‘Technology Challengers’. They are excellent technical universities with a strategic focus on innovation and with strong industrial partnerships.

Nordic Five Tech (N5T) is an exclusive, strategic alliance of the five
leading technical universities in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden:
Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Aalto University in Finland,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Royal Institute
of Technology (KTH) and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.See Nordic Five Tech website